They say you shouldn’t meet your heroes, and the same can hold true for FPS games you adored as a kid. At one point or another, every one of us revisits an old favorite, only to find that it doesn’t quite match our memories. That doesn’t make it terrible, but you have to adjust your expectations to avoid disappointment. More than other genres, first-person shooters from the 2000s have aged weirdly, even if I personally love trying games from this era.
Here’s the thing: nothing beats nostalgia. A project doesn’t need to hold up perfectly to preserve its place in history; however, you can respect a game’s legacy but also discover that you don’t love replaying it. Flaws that once were minor suddenly become exhausting, and the positives struggle a bit more to carry the load. These FPS games are still legendary, but they are a bit tougher to enjoy nowadays.
I’m only going to include games released in the 2000s, as everybody knows that GoldenEye 007 has aged terribly.
Also, just to be clear, I recommend all these titles to anybody who loves the FPS genre, as they are still a lot of fun.
Medal Of Honor: Frontline’s Finest Hour Lasts 20 Minutes
Most Of The Game Isn’t That One Mission We All Remember
Halo tends to get most of the credit, but Medal of Honor: Frontline played a big part in shaping console shooters in the early 2000s. The campaign begins with “Your Finest Hour,” one of the greatest missions in the FPS genre. Set during D-Day, you deploy onto Omaha Beach, finding yourself surrounded by intense gunfire, screaming soldiers, and a stellar soundtrack. Frontline‘s opening is the closest a game has come to recreating Saving Private Ryan, which makes sense considering Steven Spielberg’s contributions to Medal of Honor.
While the visuals might be a bit better in someone’s memories, “Your Finest Hour” is still an immaculate work of art… that sets expectations for a different game than the one we get. After leaving behind Normandy, Frontline mostly abandons any illusions of a dynamic battlefield, instead settling into a string of linear corridors. There’s nothing really wrong with that, but the actual gunplay, controls, and enemy AI aren’t all that great.
Frontline peaks in the first 20 minutes and never really comes close again.
Black Sounds Perfect
An FPS Game That Was Both Cutting Edge And Outdated
To really understand the appeal of Criterion Games’ shooter, you need to play Black in 2006. In terms of pure presentation, Black was a technical marvel, and that goes for both its visuals and audio. The graphics looked absurdly good for a PS2 and Xbox release, even if its destruction showcases don’t look nearly as impressive today. More importantly, the sound design is bombastic, deafening, and timelessly awesome; seriously, the shotgun sounds and, consequently, feels incredible.
Once you get to the actual gameplay, Black is mostly just OK and doesn’t try to do anything all that new. To be honest, the gunplay was behind the times in 2006, coming well short of the standards set by F.E.A.R., Halo 2, and Call of Duty 2. Despite lasting a measly 5 hours, the campaign gets repetitive and old surprisingly quickly, and enemies take way too many bullets to go down.
Crysis Is As Perfect As You Remember… For A Few Hours
An FPS Game That Is More Than A Meme But Less Than It Could Have Been
OK, now let’s get to the real “graphics” game. Crysis started life as a meme, and its legacy is more internet folklore than an actual game. “Can it run Crysis?” overshadowed everything, but Crytek rightfully garnered praise for putting together one of the strongest early examples of a true tactical sandbox shooter. Although it wasn’t open-world, Crysis let players manipulate the environment as they rampaged through the jungle, allwhile wearing a cool-as-heck nanosuit (that doesn’t feel as powerful as you’d think).
Unlike Black, Crysis‘ visuals still slap today.
The good news is that Crysis still rocks as a sandbox shooter. The bad news is that Crysis stops being a sandbox shooter after about 4 hours, instead devolving into a string of on-rails set pieces that just aren’t all that fun to play through. While most players likely remember this structural shift, playing through the campaign again really exposes how terrible a move it is. Without the tactical freedom offered by the sandbox structure, the gunplay isn’t satisfying enough to carry the game.
XIII Is A Near-Perfect Spy Thriller
It Is Also An FPS Game
Oh, yeah, we are getting into cult classic territory here, and XIII is rightfully remembered as one of the most stylish shooters of the early 2000s. With a graphic-novel aesthetic that creatively uses multi-panel pop-ups, Ubisoft put together an FPS game that looked nothing like anything else on the market; meanwhile, the 1970s espionage-thriller narrative was also novel, even if The Operative: No One Lives Forever had done something similar a few years earlier.
Although the story is great, XIII relies on its art style to carry the load during levels, since the gameplay simply can’t. Firing a weapon feels weightless, and the gunplay’s impact doesn’t come close to matching the visuals. The campaign would have been better off without any stealth sections, as the ones included only halt momentum. Viewed as a shooter, XIII barely qualifies as “good,” let alone anything more.
Don’t get me wrong, XIII is an incredible game, just when viewed as a spy thriller. Also, you should definitely play the original and not the remake.
TimeSplitters Is Legendary Because Of Its Sequels
Played Solo, The First Game Is Kind Of Bad
TimeSplitters ranks among the most beloved trilogies of its era, and that has almost nothing to do with the original game. TimeSplitters 2 and Future Perfect are about as brilliant as early console shooters can be, and they have aged well enough to be worth playing today and forever. Their predecessor is often included as a package deal, but it’s really not worth playing nowadays.
As a co-op or multiplayer shooter that demonstrated the PS2’s capabilities, TimeSplitters did its job by delivering great four-player chaos, a decent create-your-own-map mode, and arcade gameplay that was pretty darn fun. As a single-player shooter, TimeSplitters has nothing to offer, despite including a campaign that can be played solo. The main mode just cycles through the multiplayer maps without any sort of story, with missions being both extremely short and painfully difficult.
The Darkness Plays So Much Worse Than Its Sequel
Everything Besides The Combat Is Perfect, Though
The Darkness is one of my favorite games, and I have basically no criticisms of the story, characters, and atmosphere. If you haven’t played it in years, you should fix that today, and the Xbox 360 version is easy to buy and backward-compatible with the Xbox One and Series X/S.
The Darkness 2 is worse than its predecessor in most ways, except one: gameplay. Because they are part of the same franchise and came out during the same console generation, their combat systems might fuse together in somebody’s memories, creating the illusion that the first game is just slightly rougher than its sequel.
In truth, they play very differently from each other, and The Darkness‘ gunplay is sluggish, clunky, and devoid of any major thrills. More importantly, the guns and Darkness powers don’t combine well at all, which is one area the sequel absolutely nails.
